Page 79 of What Happens in Amsterdam

He gave her a solemn nod. “I understand. Completely deserved.”

Then he had a hundred questions about her bookstore, and she had a hundred more about his life here in Amsterdam. The kind of thirteen-year catch-up I’ve grown familiar with.

Maya takes a bite of a koffiebroodje, a swirl of sweet bread dotted with raisins, and her eyes fall shut for a moment. “Are all the pastries here this good? Because I think a few more would cure my jet lag.”

“Unfortunately, yes,” I say as I reach for a pain au chocolat.

Phoebe rests her hand on the back of Maya’s chair as she downs her second espresso of the day. “If everything is finally out in the open between you two, the sex is fantastic, and you like spending time together…then what’s holding you back?” She screws up her nose in confusion. “Sorry, am I missing something?”

My face heats with the memory of him hoisting me onto the kitchen counter a few days ago before dropping to his knees. Dragging me onto the balcony and asking how quiet I could be.

“I didn’t come here just so a man could save me.” Another few bites of pastry. “Not to mention, his family won’t ever want to see me again once they find out the truth.”

The statement is bitter on my tongue. I’ve never quite thought about it that way, but it’s the truth, isn’t it? As soon as we divorce, Roos and his mother and grandmother won’t just be out of my life—they might even see me as a villain.

“I guess that does make it a bit more awkward than your typical forbidden teenage romance turned green-card marriage,” Phoebe relents, and I’m grateful for it, because as much as I’ve craved her advice at times, right now all I want is to make it to the other side of this wedding with as little anxiety as possible.

“How’s the baby’s room coming along?” I ask.

“We’re not quite done yet.” As an interior designer, Maya’s going all out, using as many thrifted materials as possible. “It’s a bookish theme, and we have this friend working on an amazing mural combining some of the children’s classics—Goodnight Moon,Corduroy,The Very Hungry Caterpillar…”

“BabyArchitectural Digestor bust,” Phoebe says.

“I can’t wait to see it,” I say, realizing with a lump in my throat that the first time I do, it may be with two phone screens in between.

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King’s Day is a late-Aprilholiday celebrating the king’s birthday—but really, it’s more of a countrywide excuse to party.

Just about everyone has the day off work, all the shops are closed, and the drinking starts early and goes late. Over the past couple days, the city’s been setting up extra public urinals in preparation, and you can definitely smell it.

Outside it’s a riot of orange, the Netherlands’ national color.Maya decided to take it easy, so Wouter and I meet Roos and Phoebe along the Prinsengracht, where Roos gives my sister a hug and drapes orange feathered boas around our necks to match the cheap orange sunglasses Wouter and I already picked up from HEMA earlier this week. We press our way through the thick crowd, Phoebe’s jaw dropping every time we turn the corner. The streets are covered with blankets of knickknacks—vrijmarkten, free markets—because this is the one day a year yard sales are legal. There’s a guy leading a group in the Macarena. A woman with cords wrapped around herself holding a sign that saysMOBILE PHONE CHARGER. Every so often, there’s a street too packed with people for us to freely pass through, so we have no choice but to dance along to whatever electronic track is blasting through someone’s open window.

Phoebe grabs my arms and throws her head back as the horde sways with us. “This isridiculous,” she shouts. “I love it!”

When we pass more than a few people with their hair dyed orange, I reach up and ruffle Wouter’s hair. “Where’s your national pride?”

“I’m not sure my hair would survive the chemicals,” he says with a laugh. His hand finds the small of my back, guiding me through the crush of orange shirts and face paint.

“We can stay married however long you need to,” he said yesterday after a breathless morning in bed—all because I’d watched the way his forearms flexed while he was brewing tea and couldn’t resist. Evidently, the process of making tea is foreplay to me now. “What’s happening here…doesn’t have to change anything.”

There was some relief to that, of course. A year was the timeline we laid out at the beginning, but now that two months have passed since we signed those papers and he has ownership of his place, a year suddenly doesn’t seem very long at all.

When we get to Dam Fine’s dock, it seems everyone had the same idea; the canals are packed with boats, their passengerssinging in Dutch and in English, orange confetti in the air. Even though the alcohol is flowing freely, there’s an undeniable wholesomeness, too. An infectious energy.

“So it’s always on the king’s birthday, April twenty-seventh,” I say once we take off. Iulia’s at the front of the boat in her captain’s hat, Wouter next to me, and my sister on the other side, along with Sanne, Bilal, and a couple of Roos’s friends. “But…it’s not always a king, is it?”

Sanne shakes her head, some orange hair glitter scattering on the deck of the boat. “It used to be Queen’s Day. Queen Beatrix, she was the queen before Willem-Alexander—she kept it on thirtieth April because that was her mother’s birthday. She was born at the end of January, which would have been a miserable Queen’s Day.” Then she breaks off, laughing. “The year it switched over to King’s Day, a bunch of tourists came here to party on the thirtieth even though it was now the twenty-seventh.”

“It was pretty hilarious, actually,” Bilal says. “They completely missed it.” He offers around a box of tompouce, a traditional Dutch sweet with—of course—orange frosting for King’s Day. It’s small and rectangular, two layers of puff pastry with cream in the middle.

“Super lekker,” I say when I bite into it, accompanying it with the gesture I learned in Dutch class: a hand to the side of my face, waved back and forth.

“The lekker hand wave!” Roos exclaims, so enthusiastically that she nearly whacks her orange sunglasses into the canal. “I’m so proud.” She cozies up with Iulia at the front of the boat, taking selfies, stealing her captain’s hat.

Phoebe’s gaze drifts from the chaos in the canals back to Wouter and me. “God, this is all so fucking weird. Amsterdam, the two of you…everything.”

I nudge her. “That’s what I’ve been saying for the past few months.”

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